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What can a ChatGPT Plugin do?

ChatGPT Plugins allow developers to extend the capabilities of the ChatGPT model by integrating it with custom functionalities. This is done by creating endpoints that the model can interact with, thereby allowing any task that can be accomplished through an HTTP request to be integrated into a chat with ChatGPT.

Imagine being able to ask ChatGPT for a weather update and it being able to provide real-time information by fetching data from a weather API. Or perhaps you're a developer and you need quick access to a documentation - you could simply ask ChatGPT and it would fetch and display the requested information from a relevant API.

Markdown Responses​

One of the impressive features of ChatGPT Plugins is their ability to return responses in Markdown format. Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text, and it is widely used due to its simplicity.

With Markdown, your ChatGPT Plugin can return tables, display images, show code snippets, and format text with bold, italics, links, and more. For example, you could create a plugin that interacts with an e-commerce API and displays a table with product data. Or, a plugin could fetch a piece of code from GitHub and display it properly formatted in a conversation.

Prompt Engineering Techniques for Rich Responses​

The way your ChatGPT Plugin communicates its response to the user can be customized using prompt engineering techniques. This is specified in the ai-plugin.json manifest file.

You can guide how the model should construct its response. For example, you might want the model to introduce a table of results with a certain phrase, or format the response in a particular way.

Wrapping Up​

ChatGPT Plugins open a whole new world of opportunities for developers. They provide a powerful way to integrate external data sources and services into your conversations with ChatGPT. By leveraging these plugins and the flexible response formatting capabilities, developers can create rich, interactive, and incredibly useful experiences with conversational AI.